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REVERBERATIONS

REVERBERATIONS; A Musical Gospel That's Made Converts of Pop's Multitudes

By John Rockwell

Published: June 25, 2004

So it turns out Aretha Franklin didn't actually sing the national anthem at the fifth and final Pistons-Lakers N.B.A. championship game. Her producer, Brian Pastoria, told The Detroit Free Press that she lip-synched to a track she had recorded last year in the vestibule of her house in Bloomfield Hills, a Detroit suburb. No wonder they kept cutting away from her to meaningless shots of the auditorium. I figured it was because she looked a little frumpy. Turns out that she was lip-synching so sloppily that everyone would have noticed had the camera focused on her face.

All of which caused a minor news ripple. But no one mentioned that her singing of ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' was absolutely fabulous. Or, given the campy connotations of that phrase from the popular British television show, let's say it was thrilling, exciting, extraordinary. It was a great piece of singing, whether she did it in 2003 or on June 15, 2004.

At 62, Ms. Franklin is still the Queen of Soul, which is a lot more meaningful title than Michael Jackson's increasingly sad, self-assumed nickname, the King of Pop. She has always had that gutsy gospel belting sound, and the phrasing and rhythmic alacrity and heartfelt intensity that distinguishes all the best singers.

Her singing of the anthem was great not because it was unprecedented but because it epitomized and revitalized a vocal style that has grown so ubiquitous that it's become a cliché. That is the inflection of basically straightforward tunes with all manner of extra notes per syllable (melisma), ornaments and shouted exclamations.

Hardly anyone sings a song ''straight'' these days, but some take the curves better than others. Curiously, in another game-five championship game in Detroit, the 1968 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, José Feliciano shocked and thrilled America with his bluesy, melismatic version of our national anthem. To my recollection, however, he didn't do so as excitingly as Ms. Franklin did. Not even close. What made news was the novelty, at least for white mainstream America.

The Feliciano version shocked partly because of the fraught political climate that year and partly because so many Americans were apparently unfamiliar with this style of singing, at least as applied to our national anthem. It's a style that can be traced back to African and slave roots, that has defined black gospel singing then and now, and that has been the bedrock of blues, rhythm-and-blues and rock 'n' roll at its more soulful extreme. Today, reflecting the profound impact of black music on American popular culture over the last 125 years or more, it's the way we sing. It's just that not all of us can sing as well as Ms. Franklin.

Or Ray Charles, whose death has inspired a wave of respect from people who maybe loved his singing but took him a little bit for granted in his later years. True, Charles could coast, could give routine shows. But at his best he sang with a fervor that stemmed from these same gospel roots.

His death came as a salutary grace note during the weeklong officially orchestrated orgy of mourning for Ronald Reagan. That feeling of disparity between two very different men and two very different measures of accomplishment is deliciously captured on the cover of the current New Yorker magazine, offering the face of Ray Charles on a $10 bill.

My own first encounter with such singing came when I was a little boy. My parents owned a few then-new long-playing records, and two of them were by Mahalia Jackson, Ms. Franklin's great gospel predecessor (although her religion never let her stoop to the blues and sexual suggestiveness).

Jackson could have been a great opera singer: she had pipes to blow down a house; she sang like a pipe organ. Curiously, among my parents' LP's, it was two by Paul Robeson that introduced me to the sound of great operatic singing; in those benighted years, neither Jackson nor Robeson would have been allowed to sing opera, at least in America.

Jackson's renditions of gospel favorites and, especially, Christmas carols shocked me as a boy; they reoriented my whole way of hearing music. The carols were familiar to me in the four-square versions still sung in churches today, white churches anyway. Jackson twisted and bent them, just as Ms. Franklin bent ''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' but never in a way that did them any disrespect. She took those tunes and jolted them to new life.

Historically, white church music didn't always sound as bland as it often has in recent decades. Anglo-Irish folk ballads could be plenty weird, and choral traditions like shaped-note singing had a raw intensity that matched anything to be heard in a black church. But by the 1950's, a lot of white gospel music had retreated into a kind of Pleasantville of song, and hence was poised for an infusion of energy of the kind Jackson and then whole generations of gospel and soul and R & B singers could bring.

That revolution in singing did not occur in a cultural vacuum. As modernism waned, its vigorous, even revolutionary vision sliding down into corporate architectural blandness and cookie-cutter Minimalism, the seeds were being planted for the playfulness and flamboyance of post-modernism.

Rhythm-and-blues and rock 'n' roll could be seen as an expression of such exuberance in popular music. At the same time, Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland were spearheading the bel canto revival in opera, in which singers were encouraged to ornament scores with all kinds of embellishments and roulades devised by musicologists or invented by themselves. In so doing they were reviving 17th- and 18th-century practice, which had been suppressed by the ascendance of the composer and the more severe exponents of textual literalism -- the ''just follow the score and add nothing of your own'' school. Ornamented singing, gospel or bel canto, reasserts the place of the performer in the musical experience.

No style can claim absolute superiority. A pure, folkish account of ''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' as, say, Joan Baez might have done, or the songs of a simple, uninflected balladeer like the British pop singer Dido, can make an impact, too. Arturo Toscanini was the leader of the trust-the-score gang, and no performances were more impassioned than his.

Still, putting aside the lip-synching ''controversy'' -- a controversy only for those who deeply care about that now-routine show-biz device -- Ms. Franklin's singing of the anthem was a testimony to a vocal style that everyone now attempts but that she has mastered absolutely. It made me realize how much music has changed during my lifetime -- not necessarily improved, but evolved in a way that attests to the continued vitality of the art.

Photo: Aretha Franklin delivering the national anthem at the N.B.A. finals. (Photo by Associated Press)